Related Summaries

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has acknowledged it will not meet a deadline for a study to help determine whether the de minimis threshold for swap-dealer registration should fall in 2017. "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right," ISDA CEO Scott O'Malia said. "Getting the right data and using it to set the threshold is more important than trying to meet an arbitrary deadline."

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's decision to heavily regulate swaps as they are migrated to exchanges is pushing hedgers into the futures market, Mark Pengelly writes, arguing that the regulations force more risk onto traders rather than removing risk from the system.

Some market participants say IntercontinentalExchange's conversion of energy swaps to futures wasn't as smooth as portrayed, with behind-the-scenes chaos that included mixed messages about rules and a rush by some brokers and traders to get their futures-trading licenses.

Jill Sommers, a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, says she supports increasing transparency of the over-the-counter derivatives market, the central goal of the Dodd-Frank Act, but she thinks the CFTC's overly prescriptive approach to rule writing was a mistake. Sommers has said she will resign from the CFTC at the end of March.

ISDA is expected this year to release updated credit definitions, which will include measures to ensure securities other than bonds can be delivered into credit default swaps auctions. SNS Reaal, whose subordinated debt was expropriated by the Dutch government, provides a test case for an alteration some say is needed in debt restructurings.